Book Image

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Developer's Compendium: The Best of Packt for Extending SharePoint

Book Image

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Developer's Compendium: The Best of Packt for Extending SharePoint

Overview of this book

The SharePoint platform is ideal for developers looking to build exciting solutions, and SharePoint 2010 is more equipped than ever for the task. While plenty of SharePoint titles will help you understand general SharePoint development techniques or spend time focusing on one method or tool, "Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Developer's Compendium: The Best of Packt for Extending SharePoint" offers you the option of using four different tools and platforms to achieve exceptional end user experience. This book fills the gap for a comprehensive SharePoint title which describes the end goal of a SharePoint developer. So often books focus on development techniques for one tool; this will get you on your way to developing a good business website with a great user experience, however, you choose to get there, be it using PowerShell, Visual Studio, Silverlight, Windows 7 Phone, or a combination of all four. "Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Developer's Compendium: The Best of Packt for Extending SharePoint" draws from five separate titles from Packt's existing collection of excellent SharePoint titles: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Windows PowerShell 2.0: Expert Cookbook Microsoft Silverlight 4 and SharePoint 2010 Integration Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Development with Visual Studio 2010 Expert Cookbook Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Applications on Windows Phone 7 Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Business Application Development Blueprints "Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Developer's Compendium: The Best of Packt for Extending SharePoint" is an exciting mash-up of five existing Packt SharePoint titles for extending development techniques. It begins with two never before seen Packt chapters from an exciting new title, giving you a quick overview of the options available for extending SharePoint. It then moves on quickly to building a community site and discusses PowerShell scripting, as well as integrating Silverlight animations and helping you get to grips with SharePoint development on Windows Phone. With this book in hand you won't just find techniques for one development tool, you'll learn how to reach your end goal of developing a site with great user experience using a number of options at your fingertips.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Developer's Compendium: The Best of Packt for Extending SharePoint
Credits
About the Contributors
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Preface

A Packt Compendium is a book formed by drawing existing content from several related Packt titles. In other words, it is a mash-up of published Packt content - Professional Expertise Distilled in the true sense. Such a compendium of Packt's content allows you to learn from each of the chapters' unique styles and Packt does its best to compile the chapters without breaking the narrative flow for the reader.

Please note that the chapters in this compendium were originally written and intended as a part of various separate Packt titles, so you might find that the information included in this instance is more akin to that of a stand-alone chapter, rather than creating step-by-step, continuous flowing prose. We are sure that you will find this medley a useful resource with which you can benefit from the value and range of Packt books - and their authors' expertise!

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Developer's Compendium: The Best of Packt for Extending SharePoint is a medley of five separate titles from Packt's existing collection of excellent SharePoint books:

  • SharePoint 2010 Business Application Development Blueprints

  • Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Windows PowerShell 2.0: Expert Cookbook

  • Microsoft Silverlight 4 and SharePoint 2010 Integration

  • Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Development with Visual Studio 2010 Expert Cookbook

  • Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Applications on Windows Phone 7

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Understanding SharePoint Development Choices, provides some high level guidance over the different customization options that are available, tools that can be used to create different solutions, as well as some additional considerations when choosing a development path.

Chapter 2, Building an Engaging Community Site, takes the reader through the configuration and development of a community site that is meant to enhance collaboration and provide information sharing capabilities.

Chapter 3, PowerShell scripting methods and creating custom PowerShell commands, takes you further with PowerShell to create your own PowerShell commands (CMDLETs) and snap-ins and share them with your team.

Chapter 4, Integrating Silverlight 4 with SharePoint 2010, briefs you about the integration of Silverlight 4 applications with SharePoint 2010 sites and solutions. In this chapter, you will learn to prepare a development environment and look at the tools to work with Silverlight 4 RIAs. You will also configure the SharePoint 2010 server and add Silverlight Web Parts to a new page. Finally, you will create your first Silverlight RIA and then make it available in a SharePoint site.

Chapter 5, Interacting with Rich Media and Animations, will help you access asset libraries in a Silverlight RIA rendered in a SharePoint Visual Web Part. In this chapter, you will learn to take advantage of Silverlight 4 rich media features to add effects and interactive animations to images and videos.

Chapter 6, List Definitions and Content Types, will help you discover the world of content types. You will use object models to create content types, add new columns, document templates, and workflows to content types using Visual Studio 2010. This chapter also guides you through the process of creating external content types that are linked to an external data source such as the SQL Server database. At the end of the chapter, you will also learn how to create list definitions using Visual Studio.

Chapter 7, Workflows, will teach you about sequential workflows, site workflows and deploying custom initiation forms with workflows using ASPX pages and InfoPath forms. You will also learn to create custom InfoPath task forms with the workflows.

Chapter 8, Introduction to Programming Windows Phone 7 with the SharePoint Client Services, dives into building Windows Phone 7 applications that utilize SharePoint data. After a brief discussion of security in SharePoint, the chapter provides an example of building a simple RSS reader. The simple RSS reader gets data from an anonymous RSS feed from a SharePoint list, and discusses many of the basics of building a Windows Phone 7 application.

Chapter 9, Building SharePoint Pages for Windows Phone 7, begins with an examination of the difference between data stored as lists and libraries. Then it describes adding columns to a list and customizing the list item output. The chapter ends with an example of replacing the mobile home page.

Chapter 10, Building a Windows Phone 7 Dashboard Application with SharePoint Data, begins with a discussion of security in SharePoint and the example in this chapter utilizes forms based authentication in SharePoint. After a brief discussion of the tools available for building SharePoint applications on the desktop, the focus turns to building out the dashboard application for Windows Phone 7.

What you need for this book

As this Packt Compendium is a mash-up of published Packt content, the prerequisites may vary between each chapter. Everything you need for this book is detailed here respectively according to each original title.

Chapters taken from SharePoint 2010 Business Application Development Blueprints require only that you have SharePoint 2010 Server installed.

Chapters taken from Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Windows PowerShell 2.0: Expert Cookbook require that you have a system with SharePoint 2010 Server Standard installed. You may also need to have installed and configured FAST Search. We recommend downloading and installing 2010 Information Worker Demonstration and Evaluation Virtual Machine (RTM) Virtual Machine environment if you do not have a compatible system set up. The most current link to download the virtual environment can be retrieved by searching for the 2010 Information Worker Demonstration and Evaluation Virtual Machine (RTM). By downloading the preceding environment, you will ensure all of the configurations and setups have been performed and your system is ready for using PowerShell with SharePoint.

Chapter taken from Microsoft Silverlight 4 and SharePoint 2010 Integration require that you have:

  • Visual Studio 2010 Professional, Premium, or Ultimate

  • SharePoint 2010 Server or SharePoint 2010 Foundation, installed on the same computer that runs Visual Studio 2010

  • SharePoint Designer 2010

Chapters taken from Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Applications on Windows Phone 7 require that you have a Windows Phone 7 device, as well as:

  • Windows 7 with Visual Studio 2010 and the Windows Phone 7 Development Tools

  • Windows Server 2008 R2 with SharePoint 2010 Foundation, Visual Studio 2010, and the SharePoint 2010 SDK

It is worth noting that the Windows Phone 7 Emulator will not run on a machine running other virtualization software and as such, the Windows 7 machine can neither run on a virtual machine nor on other virtual machines while the emulator is running.

Chapters taken from Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Development with Visual Studio 2010 Expert Cookbook require that you have a 64-bit Windows development machine with lots of memory.

Who this book is for

This book is for developers who want to enhance their knowledge of SharePoint development to create sites with great user experience using a variety of tools.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."

A block of code is set as follows:

$siteUrl = "http://intranet.contoso.com"
$snapin = Get-PSSnapin | Where-Object {$_.Name -eq 'Microsoft.
SharePoint.Powershell'}
if ($snapin -eq $null) {
Write-Host "Loading SharePoint Powershell Snapin"
Add-PSSnapin "Microsoft.SharePoint.Powershell"
}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

protected override void CreateChildControls()
{
Control control = Page.LoadControl(_ascxPath);
Controls.Add(control);
_control = (control as AssetsBrowserWebPartUserControl);
base.CreateChildControls();
}

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:


				Add-PSSnapin "Microsoft.SharePoint.Powershell"

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Click Site Actions menu, and select the New Page item".

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Note

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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This book is a compendium title which is extracted from five different best-selling books by Packt. The code bundles for these individual titles can be also downloaded from www.packtpub.com/support.

Errata

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Questions

You can contact us at if you are having a problem with any aspect of the book, and we will do our best to address it.